Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Staunton, October 30 – Both moderate
Tatar nationalists in the World Congress of Tatars and the Kazan Institute of
History and more radical ones found in the All-Tatar Social Center, the Azatlyk
Youth Movement, and the Ittifaq Party are increasingly promoting pan-Turkic
ideas like the formation of an Idel-Ural republic including the lands between
the Volga and the Urals.

While at one level, this article
looks like an attempt to curry favor with Moscow by pointing out that
intellectuals and political activists in a republic are threatening the
territorial integrity of the country, at another, it is very much a plea by a
Bashkir writer for Moscow to support his nation and other smaller ethnic groups
lest they be absorbed by larger ones.

Tatarstan’s turn toward pan-Turkist
ideas reflects not only an act of rediscovery, he says, but also Turkey’s
geopolitical strategy and the increasing presence of Turkish organizations in
that Middle Volga republic: There are now 278 joint Turkish-Tatar firms in
Tatarstan, Turkish investment there totals two billion US dolars, and trade
turnover is running at one billion US dollars a year.

In addition, Badranov continues, since
January 2013, there has been a Turkish center in the Kazan Federal University,
and TURKSOY, the international Turkish cultural organization, has declared
Kazan to be”the capital of the Turkic world” for 2014.

But the best evidence of the convergence
of Tatar nationalist goals and Turkish ideas was provided by the October 12
commemoration of the anniversary of Ivan the Terrible’s sacking of Kazan in
1552.This year, that meeting attracted and
drew support from representatives of nationalist groups from Chuvashia, Mari
El, and Bashkortostan as well as the Kazan Tatars.

Participants carried signs reading in
English “Freedom for Tatarstan!” and “Freedom for Ideal-Ural!” and others
reading in Tatar in Latin script “Idel-Ural will be free!” Such slogans and the
use of the Latin script directed as they are against the territorial integrity
of the Russian state cannot fail to cause concern, Badranov says.

On the one hand, despite Tatar efforts
to the contrary, the Russian government has a law that prohibits the use of
Latin script by non-Russian nations within the Russian Federation.And on the other, all talk about Idel-Ural, a
state that never existed Badranov says, serves “anti-Russian theories of a
pan-Turkist trend.”

Badranov also calls attention to a
calendar produced by the Azatlyk youth movement.For 2014, it identifies the anniversary of
the sacking of Kazan as a day of mourning, ignores Russia’s Victory Day, but
calls for celebrating the conquest of “this or that Russian city” by
foreigners.

The Bashkir scholar argues that the
Tatar nationalists have aproblem
because their rewriting of history contains “mutually exclusive” claims, something
he suggests Moscow must counter because the ongoing “ethnicization of history is
fraught with its politicization” and could lead many to conclude that Russia
and Idel-Ural are moving in two very different directions.

According to Badranov, “elements of
Tatar separatism basedon extremely doubtful theoretical constructions” can
increasingly be seen. “It is difficult to predict,” he continues, “the extent
to which Tatar nationalists will shift from words to deeds and how much support
they will receive from the mass population.”

“However,” the Bashkir writer insists, “it
is obvious that the population of the republic and the Tatar populationof
neighboring regions ever more actively is being drawn into the framework of
this propaganda and a certain part is becoming a bearer of the idea about the unity
of the Turkic space,” all the more so because of the work of Tatar media.

In the event of “a social-political
crisis in the Russian Federation,” such ideas “potentially are capable of
assembling around themselves definite strata of the Tatar population in
Tatarstan and neighboring regions,” something that would threaten both the
titular nationalities of these regions and the constitutional system of the Russian
Federation.

Among these groups are the Mishars,
Teptyars, the Nogays, and Bashkirs, and Tatars in Perm Kray and Astrakhan,
Samara,Saratov, Chelyabinsk, Omsk,Tomsk, and Ulyanovsk oblasts, and, Badranov adds, “what is particularly
important for Bashkortostan,” the situation of the so-called “’western’”
Bashkirs who are linguistically especially close to the Kazan Tatars.

Unless these groups are supported and
unless the ideas of Idel-Ural and other pan-Turkic ideologies are countered, he
concludes, all these groups are at risk of being absorbed into a common
Idel-Ural identity and ultimately into a common Turkic one, developmentsthat
would destabilize the Russian Federeation.